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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26705278">Putting one and one together</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightbloomingcereus/pseuds/nightbloomingcereus'>nightbloomingcereus</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman &amp; Terry Pratchett</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Established Relationship, Fluff, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, POV Warlock Dowling, based on fanart, ineffable tutors, or as the case may be a Soft Demon taking a nap on a Fluffy Angel, so soft it's basically just a giant marshmallow taking a nap on a fluffy cloud</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:15:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,333</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26705278</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightbloomingcereus/pseuds/nightbloomingcereus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Warlock Dowling's tutors are very, very married, even if they never say so in so many words.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Mr Cortese/Mr Harrison (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>173</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Putting one and one together</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/doorwaytoparadise/gifts">doorwaytoparadise</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Inspired by <a href="https://sungmee.tumblr.com/post/630222351917793280/im-back-on-the-ineffable-tutors-train-and-having">this gorgeous artwork</a> by doorwaytoparadise (@sungmee on tumblr). I dare you to take one look at it and tell me they aren't 1000% married.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Warlock Dowling, despite his unfortunate predilection for maths, is an extraordinarily perceptive and quick-witted child. That is perhaps the one thing that his constantly bickering tutors can agree upon. </p><p>*</p><p>Mr. Cortese wears a ring on the little finger of his right hand. It looks like a snake, coiled snugly around his plump finger and biting its own tail. The only rings that Warlock has seen men wear are the sorts that his father and his father's colleagues wear: wedding bands and, on some of the Americans, the occasional ostentatious, ugly college ring that can take out an eye if one is not careful.</p><p>Mr. Cortese's ring is lovely and graceful and does not loudly proclaim his alma mater and class year, so Warlock, with a self-assurance born of nine-year-old logic, determines that it must by process of elimination be a wedding ring, only he's wearing it on the wrong finger.</p><p>So, because he is nine years old and doesn't understand the concept of tact yet, he asks.</p><p>There is a momentary flash of panic in Mr. Cortese's eyes, something that Warlock recognizes from his own experience as *I've been caught doing a bad thing<sup><a href="#fn1" id="return1" name="return1">[1]</a></sup>, but it's rapidly overtaken by a much softer, faraway look.  </p><p>"Yes, my dear boy, it is a wedding ring," says Mr. Cortese.</p><p>"But why are you wearing it on the wrong finger?"</p><p>"Well, because my—my family doesn't quite approve, I suppose."</p><p>"That's dumb," says Warlock. He might only be nine and still thinks the idea of romance is gross, but he's already dead certain that he'll never let Thaddeus and Harriet Dowling decide whom he should or should not marry. Anyone they'd choose is probably going to be <em>respectable,</em> which is just another word for <em>no fun at all</em>.</p><p>"I'm afraid it's quite a bit more complicated than that, my boy. But never mind. What's important is that <em>we</em> know, my spouse and I, that we are together. And love—well, love finds a way, despite all obstacles."</p><p>That afternoon's lesson is about great love stories in literature and history. Mr. Cortese talks and talks and talks, and Warlock listens raptly with only a minimum of misbehavior. (This lesson is, for once, interesting, so much more so than Politics and Florence Nightingale and World Domination. Even if there are no dinosaurs or robots.) Mr. Harrison interjects once with an acerbic comment about love causing wars, to which Mr. Cortese replies mildly, "Well, real love is worth fighting for, my dear." Mr. Harrison has no answer for this, and is in fact uncharacteristically quiet for the remainder of the lesson. Warlock even catches him smiling indulgently once or twice, his normally sardonic expression soft and unaffected.</p><p>He thinks he might know why. Mr. Harrison has a ring too. He wears it on a thin chain around his neck. Warlock had seen it just last week, on a day when Mr. Harrison had reappeared after lunch looking a little disheveled, with the top buttons of his shirt open and his tie undone. (Mr. Cortese had noticed too, exclaiming in a shocked voice, with a little bit of a scandalized blush, "<em>Really</em>, Cr—Mr. Harrison. Have a little <em>propriety</em> in front of the child!" Mr. Harrison had just smirked in return.)  The ring, a heavy gold thing rubbed smooth in spots with wear, with a design that looked like wings or feathers, had been nestled against his skin, gleaming gold against the red of his chest hair.</p><p>*</p><p>Mr. Cortese has been droning on for some time about the Book of Revelation, which, for a story that has a seven-headed dragon in it, is shockingly, criminally boring. At the other end of the table, Mr. Harrison appears to be trying to see how far he can tip his chair back without tumbling himself onto the floor. Warlock has been busy carving rude words into the wooden table, but the end of his pencil, his primary means of furniture defacement, has just broken off, so he finds himself suddenly bereft of distractions. </p><p>Mr. Cortese has not noticed that nobody in the room is paying attention to his lecture. He is, in fact, so involved in his monologue that he's let his mug of tea, which is still nearly full, go cold. </p><p>"This is boooooring," whines Warlock, causing Mr. Cortese to look up, in the middle of a screed about horses or seals or something, just in time to see Warlock sweep his arm across the table and send the tea flying.</p><p>The tea ends up all over Mr. Cortese, soaking into his waistcoat and staining his pale blue shirt. The mug bounces off his chest and, satisfyingly, shatters loudly on the wooden floor. Mr. Cortese still has one hand outstretched, mid-gesticulation; he makes a motion like he's about to snap his fingers.  </p><p>To Warlock's right, there is a clattering noise, as Mr. Harrison jumps to his feet and sends his precariously balanced chair tumbling to the ground. He coughs once, an abrupt, abbreviated sound. </p><p>"Oh! Oh dear!" exclaims Mr. Cortese, suddenly seeming to notice that he has an audience. He lets his hand fall to his side, and instead removes his sodden waistcoat, which is beginning to smell like a wet, tweedy sheep.  He examines the large, spreading tea stain on his shirt, sighs, and tugs on his dripping tie, letting it fall loose around his neck, before beginning to unbutton the shirt. Underneath it, he is wearing a white, short-sleeved undershirt, stretched snugly over his ample chest and belly. The liquid has soaked through this last layer as well, rendering the thin fabric nearly translucent and revealing the dark, bold lines of an intricate, sinuous tattoo on the left side of his chest, directly over his heart.</p><p>Mr. Harrison's cough seems to have turned into a strangled sort of choking noise.  His face and ears are red – they match his beard, which Warlock finds funny – and he's staring at Mr. Cortese.</p><p>Mr. Cortese sets Warlock to writing lines – <em>I will show the proper respect to a good English cuppa</em>, a hundred times – before gathering up the broken shards of the mug in a handkerchief monogrammed with the letters <em>AJC</em> and disappearing to see whether his sodden clothing is salvageable. Mr. Harrison, once he's recovered enough to shove his tongue back into his mouth and remember that vowels exist, merely winks<sup><a href="#fn2" id="return2" name="return2">[2]</a></sup>, rights his upended chair, and sits himself down to supervise. </p><p>Warlock has seen the tattoo, of course, on Mr. Harrison's face. Everyone in the house has, by this point; it had turned heads at the beginning, but people are used to it by now. It's wickedly cool, even halfway obscured and softened by the red fuzz of his beard.  A snake, black and bold and swirly and entrancing. It's a striking design, not one that is easy to forget. The two tattoos, one on each of his tutors, are perfect mirrors of one another, the one curved primarily counterclockwise with the head pointed downward, the other clockwise and pointed upward.</p><p>*</p><p>Mr. Harrison is, as he often is, late. <em>Fashionably late,</em> he would say. <em>Unpardonably tardy</em>, Mr. Cortese would counter, without missing a beat<sup><a href="#fn3" id="return3" name="return3">[3]</a></sup>. Today, he swans in to the Dowlings' library, where his colleague and his pupil have been not-entirely-patiently waiting for the past fifteen minutes, grinning and brandishing a large, shiny red apple.  This he presents to Mr. Cortese with a dramatic flourish and a bow so low it's a miracle he's still on two feet, announcing, "An apple for teacher!"</p><p>"Thank you, dear," murmurs Mr. Cortese. "Is that from the farmer's market in the village? It looks positively scrumptious."</p><p>"Mmmpffsawitnthoughtfyou."</p><p>"That's awfully kind of you. I do enjoy apples."</p><p>"Not kind. 'M winning. Because the little hellion'll never bring you one."  He licks his finger and draws a line in the air. "Point to me."</p><p>Mr. Cortese does not bother to reply. He smiles though, and turns the apple back and forth in his hand, contemplating it, before setting it on the table in front of him and clearing his throat to begin the day's teaching. </p><p>The day is filled with a long and boring procession of lessons about Moral Codes (which make Mr. Harrison roll his eyes) and the French Revolution (which makes Mr. Cortese blush) and British Colonialism (which makes both of them upset for reasons that they claim are different but sound very much the same to Warlock). The very last hour is devoted to Maths. Warlock sits at the table and works out sums and equations, and does not notice that both of his tutors have gone quiet until he hears a faint snore. </p><p>He glances over to the side, where the two men have repaired to the small couch beneath the window. Mr. Harrison has his arms folded and his eyes closed, and is snoring lightly. In sleep, he slouches even more than normal, slumping bonelessly against Mr. Cortese's tweed-clad shoulder. Mr. Cortese's left hand cradles the crown of his head, the fingers running gently through his hair.</p><p>Mr. Harrison's ever-present sunglasses are slipping down his face, a hair's breadth away from falling from the sharp ledge of his nose. Mr. Cortese gently lifts them from his face and sets them down beside his own little round wire-rims on top of the book in his lap. The gesture is infinitely tender and fluid in a way that bespeaks a long familiarity, as if it had been made a thousand times before. The bent ends of the temples of the two pairs of glasses touch and just barely cross. Mr. Cortese places one hand lightly over them, to keep them from falling. He tips his head to the side, very slightly, resting his cheek on the flame-red hair, and lets his own eyes fall shut.</p><p>Mr. Cortese is normally all nervous hand gestures and twitchy, stiff-backed tension. Mr. Harrison is constantly fidgeting, slouching and swaying and gesticulating widely with his entire body. But in repose, in the late afternoon sunlight angling warm and gold through the window, they're both still and calm. The little worried furrow between Mr. Cortese's eyes, the effortful arch of Mr. Harrison's eyebrow: these things are smoothed out and softened by sleep. There is an air of quiet, lazy contentment.</p><p>Warlock, little hellion though he may be, heeds some instinct that he does not yet know quite how to name and tiptoes out of the room, careful not to make too much noise, and shuts the door softly behind him.</p><p>He is reminded of something he saw a long time ago, when he was perhaps five or six, on one of the many nights when both of his parents were nowhere to be found and he'd snuck out of bed after Nanny had tucked him in and sung her lullabies. Nanny and Brother Francis had been sitting side-by-side at the kitchen island in the moonlight, their backs to the door and heads bent together in whispered conversation too quiet for an eavesdropping child to overhear.  The back of Nanny's hair had looked very dark, like the night, and Brother Francis' very pale and white, like the moon. To one side, two mostly-empty wineglasses stood on the granite countertop, so close together that the prints of two pairs of lips, one lipstick-red, the other wine-stained, were nearly touching. </p><p>*</p><p>There are other things, of course – a single moon-white scale on the right side of a snake's red belly, one eye of molten gold among a multitude of silver-blue ones – but those are things that humans, even extraordinarily perceptive nine-year-old boys, are far too young to comprehend. But even without these incontrovertible signs, Warlock knows. It's not hard to put two and two together<sup><a href="#fn4" id="return4" name="return4">[4]</a></sup>, and maths have always come intuitively to him.</p><p>And besides, he's seen Mr. Harrison's tartan socks.</p><p>*</p><p>It was too bad, really, that Warlock was the wrong boy. Aziraphale and Crowley had done all right by him, even if the most important lesson wasn't any of the ones they'd actually taught. Despite the Satanic lullabies and the exhortations to be Good and the paeans to Attila the Hun, they had somehow managed, admittedly mostly by accident, to teach him all the right things after all.</p><p>If Warlock Dowling <em>had</em> been the Antichrist, maybe the whole almost-Armageddon debacle might have gone a lot more smoothly than it actually had. Maybe it would have all come to an uneventful, quiet conclusion on his eleventh birthday. Maybe he would have sent the dog away, or simply wished it into nonexistence, and let the world keep turning on and on, just as it always had, with its birthday parties and food fights and moments of unguarded, unconditional love.</p><p>But, on the other hand, maybe it all works out perfectly, in the end.</p><p>*</p><p>Gently, ever so gently, with an ease born of long familiarity, Warlock leans over and delicately plucks the reading glasses from his sleeping husband's face.  He sets them down on the coffee table beside his own, so that the temples are just kissing. He brushes the golden curls, now sprinkled with grey, away from the much-beloved forehead and drops a small, quiet kiss there.</p><p>"Adam, love," he says softly. "Come to bed."</p>
<hr/><p><a id="fn1" name="fn1"></a><sup>[1]</sup>Or a good thing, depending on which one of his tutors was doing the catching.<sup><a href="#return1">return to text</a></sup></p><p><a id="fn2" name="fn2"></a><sup>[2]</sup>Warlock can't see his eyes at all behind the sunglasses, and yet the wink is incredibly obvious. It's a very smirky, cheeky sort of wink that takes over his entire face.<sup><a href="#return2">return to text</a></sup></p><p><a id="fn3" name="fn3"></a><sup>[3]</sup>Once they get started, their bickering usually takes up another five minutes at least. Not that Warlock minds, because that's five minutes more in which he can goof off.<sup><a href="#return3">return to text</a></sup></p><p><a id="fn4" name="fn4"></a><sup>[4]</sup>Or, as the case may be, one and one together. Warlock is too young to understand the grown-up silliness that is idiom, and 1+1=2 makes much more sense to him in this particular situation anyway.<sup><a href="#return4">return to text</a></sup></p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Come visit me <a href="https://moondawntreader.tumblr.com">@moondawntreader</a> on tumblr!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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